Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Black Moon Lilith in the second house

the mean Black Moon Lilith (the mean lunar apogee) in the second house

What the tradition reads

With Black Moon Lilith in the second house, the tradition reads her themes of shame and refusal as centred on money, possessions and self worth rather than on the outward self of the first house. Cafe Astrology's delineation of Lilith by house ties the second house to the same reading given for Lilith in Taurus, since both govern personal resources: shame around self indulgence, around holding onto what one has, or around simply enjoying comfort without apologising for it, producing a person who may swing between hoarding and giving everything away rather than settling into an easy, unashamed relationship with what they own. The tradition reads a related difficulty in ever feeling fully satisfied, a wanting that persists even once its object has been acquired. As with every Lilith placement, the reading suggests the discomfort eases only once a person accepts their own appetite for security and comfort as ordinary rather than shameful.

The story

The second house is succedent, following directly after an angle and read in the tradition as consolidating what the angle before it begins, in this case turning the first house's raw self into the second house's sense of personal value and resource. Alan Leo reads the succedent houses as indicating matters connected with the feelings and emotions, not yet ripe for physical expression but maturing for future development, and gives the second house finance and monetary prospects, the outcome of the labour or profession in remuneration and monetary condition generally. Lilith's placement here draws on two histories: the astrological point's origin in Sepharial's 1918 proposal of an undiscovered second moon, a claim eventually abandoned once no such body could be confirmed to exist, and the older legend of Lilith, whose story in Jewish folklore is in part a story about refusing to be treated as someone else's possession. A point already associated with a refusal to be owned, placed in the house that governs what a person owns and values, gives the pairing its own quiet irony: the very house of holding on carries, in Lilith, the memory of someone who would not be held.

Written from

Corpus key point:Lilith:house:2.